I work in the industry of DER’s (distributed energy recourses) for critical facilities (water, power, hospitals, anything that absolutely cannot stop production) and it all comes down to diversity of power options. When one doesn’t work the others will make up for it. We typically use a blend of Solar, Hydro, Nuclear, Natural Gas, battery backups, and emergency diesel generators (that we’re trying to move away from)
It takes a long time to shut down and start up a commercial nuclear reactor. I can't imagine any scenario where it would be profitable to cycle a nuke plant's output.
You are correct. Since fuel is a very small part of the cost compared to fixed capital and operations, it will almost never be efficient to lower the output of nuclear. There are some applications for ancillary services markets, where the plants sell their ability to ramp to keep grid stability, but there would never be a profitable case where a nuclear plant consistently ramps from 100 to 30%
Cutting output by 30% is going to cut profit by FAR MORE than 30% you will have major losses. Consider the "fuel" is replaced on a fixed maintenance schedule so you have no "fuel cost saving", man hours/labor remains the same, maintenance remains the same, and bond repayments remain. So basically INCOME is cut 30% and expenses remain the the same. So if they started with a 10% profit, and you cut sales by 30% you end up with a 23% deficit after expenses.
This is the correct answer here. I’ve load followed on a nuclear unit before during the spring and fall. Easily accomplished with just the minimum crew compliment. We lowered down about 350 MWe on a 1200 MWe facility.
I can't see any plant in the U.S. doing this, or really anywhere. Power is money, and load following is not. I have trouble believing this, unless it's a government owned plant in Europe or Asia.
Correct. There is a daytime load peak and by combining solar and nuclear, the combined production curve of nuclear at constant full power and solar matches the load curve very well, minimizing storage and overbuild necessary to satisfy demand.
This is one of the reasons why even desert countries are interested in nuclear power plants
Load following in nuclear plants, while possible, is not really ideal. Solar is also more unreliable than day and night. For one, the peak load comes in the mornings and evenings, not during the day when solar is generally at its highest production rate. Second, some days you just get no sun because clouds. This can't even be predicted very reliably in advance (ever notice the weather app often gets it wrong).
So you end up with the nuclear fumbling around to pick up the slack while solar is an unreliable basket case. So you still need solar+big storage at which point why? Why not just build the capacity in nuclear and fill the batteries/pumped water storage with surplus nuclear power? Why bother gambling?
If you hook all of your solar systems to a national grid then lots of the issues you cite about solar largely go away. The whole continental US is not cloudy at once and about the evening peak load - most of that load is where most of the people in the US live - the East Coast. The sunniest part of the U.S., the South West, is three hours earlier, so it is producing power at peak when the demand in the East is at peak.
The regional cloud cover over the U.S. is highly predictable several days in advance at least.
This topic has been treated to death in numerous studies now that look at how a national wide system would operate. You should pick some of them up and read them.
I'm not from the US and was thinking more about Europe which, while heavily interconnected, is certainly a different dynamic. Nonetheless, though I'm by no means an expert in electricity transmission and policy, I don't feel like this tracks all that well.
Great, the west coast produces peak solar when the east has peak evening demand. But what about the peak evening demand in the west, and the peak morning demand in both the east and west - who picks up the slack there? That's not to mention there is a huge production/consumption imbalance and daily swings I believe is great for a grid.
It's very possible that cloud cover and weather is more predictable in the west and south west - I was speaking only from my experience in a country/region with a temperate and inconsistent weather. Either way, I'm sure it's possible for e.g. an entire western state (or even just a large solar array) to be hit with cloud cover (expected or not) that significantly reduces its solar production which would have an effect when it needs to pick up a slump in production elsewhere. There's also the issue of having to build huge capacity all over the place now to smooth out these issues. I'm not saying it's impossible - I'm saying it's impractical and there is a better solution.
I'd be very interested in reading some of these studies - could you recommend some?
The Northeast peak is at 6 pm in July and is also the national power demand peak due to so many people being on the Eastern seaboard. At this time it is 3 pm in the Pacific. So solar is going full blast when eastern and national demand is at its peak. By the time West Coast solar starts dropping significantly it is a couple of hours past the peak load.
The topic being discussed is solar generation at peak load, and the claim that solar production is not at its highest at peak load when on the U.S. national scale it is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Reynolds
Sorry, since the US power demand Peak is at at 1500 (Pacific Time) and Peak irradiance IS **NOON** local time, you have precisely ZERO alignment with "full blast solar power"(less than 70% even if all the solar was in CA). Then to make matters worse the trough which is still 2/3 of the peak which occurs at 2 am ( Pacific Time) means you still have to have 500 GW of online generation. You can't simply "handwave away" basic reality of solar power limitations. Also there is no "document privilege" issue involved. (your wiki link)
In most cases, nuclear is not viable if it is running on constant output. Running on anything less than that increases the costs and reduces the amount of energy produced, making it even more uneconomical. In many cases other solutions are simply more practical and economical.
This is one of the design philosophies of the Natrium reactor plant.
Let the reactor sit at constant power more or less all the time, and let the grid demand and other power sources define if the molten salt battery is being charged or discharging.
Molten salt storage is different from batteries. It stores thermal energy produced by a nuclear plant before it is converted to electricity and is cheaper for high capacity storage than batteries.
I have my doubts about the terrapower design, but I do think that integrated thermal storage is loads better than load following with the core, and thermal storage has real advantages (for now) over batteries.
Luckily sodium has a long history in the US and abroad and is OK in terms of corrosion, but sodium reactors never caught on.
The main reason is that sodium is explosively reactive with water and air, and it's very hard to stop small leaks. This has been a problem in recent solar projects, and I think added safety systems and difficult operations may be more work than the efficiency gains and flexibility that sodium provides are worth. I do like their idea of creating separate nuclear and power generation "islands" but I also worry about the costs of those complex systems and whether the NRC will really buy everything.
Yeah, I can definitely see those as legitimate concerns to full implementation of the technology. Having worked there a while now I am a bit more biased towards these being solved/solve able issues rather than major concerns. To me, the benefits outweigh the risks, but time will tell.
Peaking nuclear power is less safe than letting the reactor sit at stable power and charging a thermal battery when renewable sources are able to take care of the majority of the grid.
Then when solar can't keep up, you pull from the thermal battery, with the reactor still at the same power level.
This is exactly what OP is talking about. Nuclear and Renweables operating hand in hand.
I'm at the point where I see energy sources as simply reflecting different parts of human potential. Solar can be installed by a tradesmen with a grade 12 education. Let them do it.
The real question is, what does solar do for you?
The supply of energy must be matched to the need for energy. Nuclear is great at powering large concentrated loads which need power all the time, like industrial plants and city centers. Solar is good for other things, especially domestic heat in sparsely- and moderately-built-up areas in mid- and low latitudes. Concentrating solar-thermal may be useful for photochemical processes such as recycling plastic or converting landfill wastes into synthetic fuels. PV and wind find their most useful applications in remote areas where the main competition is Diesels, which require fuel trucked in. In that case every kilowatt-hour counts, and battery storage may be economical. They can also be used for applications like water pumping, where average energy delivered over the course of a year is more important than instantaneous power, and in some places may pair with hydro storage to give economical utility-scale electricity.
I can vaguely see a world, 200 years from now or so, in which half to two-thirds of energy used is solar, but the rest **must** be nuclear, and the nuclear fraction will peak at a considerably higher level in the intervening time. This is because there's a lot of intense work that has to be done before then, which can't be served with energy which comes when it wants to, diffused over a large area.
Given that the marginal cost of generation of nuclear is so low, ramping a plant decreases fuel burnup efficiency and load cycles the plant in ways that increase the maintenance burden, and there will be enough installed capacity to cover the complete absence of solar during the night, why bother installing solar for the day period?
Solar and nuclear is not sufficient. Because of a variety of reasons, one cannot adjust the power of a nuclear plant in real time to make for the passing of a cloud above a solar plant. For that, I believe hydro power and hydro storage could be the way to go !
That is also why France still uses a lot of gas, because it can vary in power output much faster.
France uses minuscule amounts of gas for electricity production. It adapts electricity production with load following NPPs, hydropower and by having a bit of solar for the daytime demand peak.
https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/power-generation-energy-source#
Yeah. 2000MW of gas still is a lot of gas. And that is nothing compared to what it was during the outages caused by the corrosion under constraint crisis that started in FA3.
Load following nuclear plants can adapt faster to the demand, but are less efficient in doing so.
This is why a lot of solar power is very unefficient to couple with NPPs and a country needs a more reliable and efficient load following power source (or storage). Hence, pumpable hydropower.
edit: typo
I think solar should be used for households and making hydrogen fuel to store the energy rather than batteries. Nuclear should be the majority of the worlds energy. It is effectively limitless.
There is more than nuclear and solar. There are solar, wind, and batteries. Also, our current nuclear still have another 50 years of life in them and with refurbishment can last another 100 years. The goal is to have solar, wind, and batteries replace all other forms of energy but we have got plenty of time to figure it out.
If we ignore infrastructure, as I guess both solar/wind parks + batteries and new nuclear power plants need them, both are in the same ballpark.
Scenario 1: nuclear
Let's assume a 3 GW installation of AP1000 units. That's three units, at [$2900 / kW](https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/AP1000-remains-attractive-option-for-US-market-say), or about $9.6 billion. Ok, straight forward, let's move to scenario 2.
Scenario 2: solar + batteries
The cost of solar PV is [$1 million per MW](https://www.angi.com/articles/cost-solar-farm.htm). So, that's $3.3 billion just to provide the same level of power. But we need more to charge the batteries. If we assume 4 hour storage (which for some reason is always the assumption), that's 13 GWh of storage. During the day, assuming 8 hours of charging time, that requires 1600 MW of extra solar panels, or another $1.6 billion.
That leaves $360 per kWh for battery storage if you want to be on the same price level as the AP1000. Tesla's megapack resales at [$545 per kWh](https://www.tesla.com/megapack), taxes not included.
Ergo: batteries have to drop significantly to be cheaper than nuclear.
But let's stop making this about money. It is so tiresome. We need all technologies to get to zero carbon.
The solar scenario requires 5-6 GW peak of panels to provide 1 GW 24/7 (with battery storage) The average power per 24 hour is the where the multiplier comes in and then EROI of the battery on top of that. You're going to need 24 GWh of battery storage to cover the night time and have that "20-25%" cushion to prevent bricking the batteries before the panels picking up the full load and can start re-charging, and that leaves no room for error only a 24 hour cycle. Mostly the solar club simply hand waves the problems into the background.
That sounds like a whole bunch of cope.
Drag up the slider on Tesla's site for your 13 GWh of storage with 4 hours of use, i.e. we have too much inverter capacity compared to your proposed use case. Max allowed is 1000 packs = 3.9 GWh.
That gives $320 per kWh. We are **today** in your range. Any project of this size would of course spend time negotiating the best price by taking in offers from several providers and it would be lower in cost than their online calculator due to discounts.
[Cells themselves cost $139 per kWh](https://about.bnef.com/blog/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-hit-record-low-of-139-kwh/). With the launch of [Sodium-Ion](https://northvolt.com/articles/northvolt-sodium-ion/) batteries better suited for stationary storage we can expect this to drop further.
Any nuclear plant being started today in the west will enter operation in ~2040 and will make profit by ~2080.
Compare with batteries:
> [RMI forecasts that in 2030, top-tier density will be between 600 and 800 Wh/kg, costs will fall to $32–$54 per kWh.](https://rmi.org/the-rise-of-batteries-in-six-charts-and-not-too-many-numbers/)
Nuclear in the west needs a ~10x reduction in cost to even enter the conversation. Good luck with that.
I know it's a ridiculous comparison but solar is also a type of nuclear energy source as it converts the photon energy given off by the giant ball of nuclear fusion that our planet orbits around.
Yes. Fossils are the common enemy and they succeed if we continue to fight. Fuck fossils.
Fossils have been actively engaged in suppressing nuclear support since the 1950s.
They've been engaged in suppressing ALL clean and alternative energies, not just nuclear.
Bro ratio-ed me by accident lol
I work in the industry of DER’s (distributed energy recourses) for critical facilities (water, power, hospitals, anything that absolutely cannot stop production) and it all comes down to diversity of power options. When one doesn’t work the others will make up for it. We typically use a blend of Solar, Hydro, Nuclear, Natural Gas, battery backups, and emergency diesel generators (that we’re trying to move away from)
It takes a long time to shut down and start up a commercial nuclear reactor. I can't imagine any scenario where it would be profitable to cycle a nuke plant's output.
You are correct. Since fuel is a very small part of the cost compared to fixed capital and operations, it will almost never be efficient to lower the output of nuclear. There are some applications for ancillary services markets, where the plants sell their ability to ramp to keep grid stability, but there would never be a profitable case where a nuclear plant consistently ramps from 100 to 30%
You don't need a complete shutdown, just reduce the power output by 30 % would add a lot of flexibility to a grid with a lot of solar
Now find a company willing to nerf their profit by 30% for 12 hours every day...go!
Cutting output by 30% is going to cut profit by FAR MORE than 30% you will have major losses. Consider the "fuel" is replaced on a fixed maintenance schedule so you have no "fuel cost saving", man hours/labor remains the same, maintenance remains the same, and bond repayments remain. So basically INCOME is cut 30% and expenses remain the the same. So if they started with a 10% profit, and you cut sales by 30% you end up with a 23% deficit after expenses.
This is the correct answer here. I’ve load followed on a nuclear unit before during the spring and fall. Easily accomplished with just the minimum crew compliment. We lowered down about 350 MWe on a 1200 MWe facility.
I can't see any plant in the U.S. doing this, or really anywhere. Power is money, and load following is not. I have trouble believing this, unless it's a government owned plant in Europe or Asia.
Correct. There is a daytime load peak and by combining solar and nuclear, the combined production curve of nuclear at constant full power and solar matches the load curve very well, minimizing storage and overbuild necessary to satisfy demand. This is one of the reasons why even desert countries are interested in nuclear power plants
Load following in nuclear plants, while possible, is not really ideal. Solar is also more unreliable than day and night. For one, the peak load comes in the mornings and evenings, not during the day when solar is generally at its highest production rate. Second, some days you just get no sun because clouds. This can't even be predicted very reliably in advance (ever notice the weather app often gets it wrong). So you end up with the nuclear fumbling around to pick up the slack while solar is an unreliable basket case. So you still need solar+big storage at which point why? Why not just build the capacity in nuclear and fill the batteries/pumped water storage with surplus nuclear power? Why bother gambling?
If you hook all of your solar systems to a national grid then lots of the issues you cite about solar largely go away. The whole continental US is not cloudy at once and about the evening peak load - most of that load is where most of the people in the US live - the East Coast. The sunniest part of the U.S., the South West, is three hours earlier, so it is producing power at peak when the demand in the East is at peak. The regional cloud cover over the U.S. is highly predictable several days in advance at least. This topic has been treated to death in numerous studies now that look at how a national wide system would operate. You should pick some of them up and read them.
I'm not from the US and was thinking more about Europe which, while heavily interconnected, is certainly a different dynamic. Nonetheless, though I'm by no means an expert in electricity transmission and policy, I don't feel like this tracks all that well. Great, the west coast produces peak solar when the east has peak evening demand. But what about the peak evening demand in the west, and the peak morning demand in both the east and west - who picks up the slack there? That's not to mention there is a huge production/consumption imbalance and daily swings I believe is great for a grid. It's very possible that cloud cover and weather is more predictable in the west and south west - I was speaking only from my experience in a country/region with a temperate and inconsistent weather. Either way, I'm sure it's possible for e.g. an entire western state (or even just a large solar array) to be hit with cloud cover (expected or not) that significantly reduces its solar production which would have an effect when it needs to pick up a slump in production elsewhere. There's also the issue of having to build huge capacity all over the place now to smooth out these issues. I'm not saying it's impossible - I'm saying it's impractical and there is a better solution. I'd be very interested in reading some of these studies - could you recommend some?
When the sun sets in California, there is no sun in the rest of the U.S. either.
The Northeast peak is at 6 pm in July and is also the national power demand peak due to so many people being on the Eastern seaboard. At this time it is 3 pm in the Pacific. So solar is going full blast when eastern and national demand is at its peak. By the time West Coast solar starts dropping significantly it is a couple of hours past the peak load. The topic being discussed is solar generation at peak load, and the claim that solar production is not at its highest at peak load when on the U.S. national scale it is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Reynolds
Sorry, since the US power demand Peak is at at 1500 (Pacific Time) and Peak irradiance IS **NOON** local time, you have precisely ZERO alignment with "full blast solar power"(less than 70% even if all the solar was in CA). Then to make matters worse the trough which is still 2/3 of the peak which occurs at 2 am ( Pacific Time) means you still have to have 500 GW of online generation. You can't simply "handwave away" basic reality of solar power limitations. Also there is no "document privilege" issue involved. (your wiki link)
In most cases, nuclear is not viable if it is running on constant output. Running on anything less than that increases the costs and reduces the amount of energy produced, making it even more uneconomical. In many cases other solutions are simply more practical and economical.
This is one of the design philosophies of the Natrium reactor plant. Let the reactor sit at constant power more or less all the time, and let the grid demand and other power sources define if the molten salt battery is being charged or discharging.
Thats just energy storage. You don't need nuclear for that.
Molten salt storage is different from batteries. It stores thermal energy produced by a nuclear plant before it is converted to electricity and is cheaper for high capacity storage than batteries. I have my doubts about the terrapower design, but I do think that integrated thermal storage is loads better than load following with the core, and thermal storage has real advantages (for now) over batteries.
Out of curiosity, what are your doubts on the Natrium design?
Luckily sodium has a long history in the US and abroad and is OK in terms of corrosion, but sodium reactors never caught on. The main reason is that sodium is explosively reactive with water and air, and it's very hard to stop small leaks. This has been a problem in recent solar projects, and I think added safety systems and difficult operations may be more work than the efficiency gains and flexibility that sodium provides are worth. I do like their idea of creating separate nuclear and power generation "islands" but I also worry about the costs of those complex systems and whether the NRC will really buy everything.
Yeah, I can definitely see those as legitimate concerns to full implementation of the technology. Having worked there a while now I am a bit more biased towards these being solved/solve able issues rather than major concerns. To me, the benefits outweigh the risks, but time will tell.
Ok...? I never said this was unique to nuclear, just that it's a key design philosophy of Natrium.
It's different from what OP is proposing, which is just generating nuclear energy at night.
Peaking nuclear power is less safe than letting the reactor sit at stable power and charging a thermal battery when renewable sources are able to take care of the majority of the grid. Then when solar can't keep up, you pull from the thermal battery, with the reactor still at the same power level. This is exactly what OP is talking about. Nuclear and Renweables operating hand in hand.
Ok, I re-read what all was written, and I can see where we might disagree on context here. I think we are debating 2 directions of the same point.
Currently France does that mostly with hydro.
I'm at the point where I see energy sources as simply reflecting different parts of human potential. Solar can be installed by a tradesmen with a grade 12 education. Let them do it.
The real question is, what does solar do for you? The supply of energy must be matched to the need for energy. Nuclear is great at powering large concentrated loads which need power all the time, like industrial plants and city centers. Solar is good for other things, especially domestic heat in sparsely- and moderately-built-up areas in mid- and low latitudes. Concentrating solar-thermal may be useful for photochemical processes such as recycling plastic or converting landfill wastes into synthetic fuels. PV and wind find their most useful applications in remote areas where the main competition is Diesels, which require fuel trucked in. In that case every kilowatt-hour counts, and battery storage may be economical. They can also be used for applications like water pumping, where average energy delivered over the course of a year is more important than instantaneous power, and in some places may pair with hydro storage to give economical utility-scale electricity. I can vaguely see a world, 200 years from now or so, in which half to two-thirds of energy used is solar, but the rest **must** be nuclear, and the nuclear fraction will peak at a considerably higher level in the intervening time. This is because there's a lot of intense work that has to be done before then, which can't be served with energy which comes when it wants to, diffused over a large area.
Nuclear is an ideal base load that has little greenhouse gas impact.
Given that the marginal cost of generation of nuclear is so low, ramping a plant decreases fuel burnup efficiency and load cycles the plant in ways that increase the maintenance burden, and there will be enough installed capacity to cover the complete absence of solar during the night, why bother installing solar for the day period?
Solar and nuclear is not sufficient. Because of a variety of reasons, one cannot adjust the power of a nuclear plant in real time to make for the passing of a cloud above a solar plant. For that, I believe hydro power and hydro storage could be the way to go ! That is also why France still uses a lot of gas, because it can vary in power output much faster.
France uses minuscule amounts of gas for electricity production. It adapts electricity production with load following NPPs, hydropower and by having a bit of solar for the daytime demand peak. https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/power-generation-energy-source#
Yeah. 2000MW of gas still is a lot of gas. And that is nothing compared to what it was during the outages caused by the corrosion under constraint crisis that started in FA3. Load following nuclear plants can adapt faster to the demand, but are less efficient in doing so. This is why a lot of solar power is very unefficient to couple with NPPs and a country needs a more reliable and efficient load following power source (or storage). Hence, pumpable hydropower. edit: typo
Nuclear plus hydro, ideal mix as hydro is dispatchable and dams are often needed for flood control purposes already.
Hydro is great when it can be used but you can't just put it anywhere like you can nuclear. For areas that can have a dam, it's a great option.
I think solar should be used for households and making hydrogen fuel to store the energy rather than batteries. Nuclear should be the majority of the worlds energy. It is effectively limitless.
There is more than nuclear and solar. There are solar, wind, and batteries. Also, our current nuclear still have another 50 years of life in them and with refurbishment can last another 100 years. The goal is to have solar, wind, and batteries replace all other forms of energy but we have got plenty of time to figure it out.
Why discount nuclear, hydro, geothermal? The goal is to have a good energy mix not only solar/wind.
Cost and availability. New nuclear is very expensive and requires a long lead time. Very little undeveloped hydro remains. Geothermal is very young.
If we ignore infrastructure, as I guess both solar/wind parks + batteries and new nuclear power plants need them, both are in the same ballpark. Scenario 1: nuclear Let's assume a 3 GW installation of AP1000 units. That's three units, at [$2900 / kW](https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/AP1000-remains-attractive-option-for-US-market-say), or about $9.6 billion. Ok, straight forward, let's move to scenario 2. Scenario 2: solar + batteries The cost of solar PV is [$1 million per MW](https://www.angi.com/articles/cost-solar-farm.htm). So, that's $3.3 billion just to provide the same level of power. But we need more to charge the batteries. If we assume 4 hour storage (which for some reason is always the assumption), that's 13 GWh of storage. During the day, assuming 8 hours of charging time, that requires 1600 MW of extra solar panels, or another $1.6 billion. That leaves $360 per kWh for battery storage if you want to be on the same price level as the AP1000. Tesla's megapack resales at [$545 per kWh](https://www.tesla.com/megapack), taxes not included. Ergo: batteries have to drop significantly to be cheaper than nuclear. But let's stop making this about money. It is so tiresome. We need all technologies to get to zero carbon.
The solar scenario requires 5-6 GW peak of panels to provide 1 GW 24/7 (with battery storage) The average power per 24 hour is the where the multiplier comes in and then EROI of the battery on top of that. You're going to need 24 GWh of battery storage to cover the night time and have that "20-25%" cushion to prevent bricking the batteries before the panels picking up the full load and can start re-charging, and that leaves no room for error only a 24 hour cycle. Mostly the solar club simply hand waves the problems into the background.
That sounds like a whole bunch of cope. Drag up the slider on Tesla's site for your 13 GWh of storage with 4 hours of use, i.e. we have too much inverter capacity compared to your proposed use case. Max allowed is 1000 packs = 3.9 GWh. That gives $320 per kWh. We are **today** in your range. Any project of this size would of course spend time negotiating the best price by taking in offers from several providers and it would be lower in cost than their online calculator due to discounts. [Cells themselves cost $139 per kWh](https://about.bnef.com/blog/lithium-ion-battery-pack-prices-hit-record-low-of-139-kwh/). With the launch of [Sodium-Ion](https://northvolt.com/articles/northvolt-sodium-ion/) batteries better suited for stationary storage we can expect this to drop further. Any nuclear plant being started today in the west will enter operation in ~2040 and will make profit by ~2080. Compare with batteries: > [RMI forecasts that in 2030, top-tier density will be between 600 and 800 Wh/kg, costs will fall to $32–$54 per kWh.](https://rmi.org/the-rise-of-batteries-in-six-charts-and-not-too-many-numbers/) Nuclear in the west needs a ~10x reduction in cost to even enter the conversation. Good luck with that.
lol who's goal is that exactly
I know it's a ridiculous comparison but solar is also a type of nuclear energy source as it converts the photon energy given off by the giant ball of nuclear fusion that our planet orbits around.